Solomon Hughes on playing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 'Winning Time’

Edge of Sports

Dave Zirin / The Nation

News, Sports News, Sports, History, Politics

4.8 • 616 Ratings

🗓️ 12 July 2023

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From 1979 to 1991, the Los Angeles Lakers would become a dominant force in the world of professional basketball and in American culture more broadly. Led by coach Pat Riley and star players Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the “Showtime” era of the Lakers is still, in many ways, the standard by which other sports dynasties are measured today. On the court, in the locker room, and beyond, the legendary Lakers franchise was both a reflection and a driver of a culture, a sport, and a country undergoing seismic changes, and the HBO dramatized series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty tells the story of the larger-than-life personalities and politics that defined the Showtime era.

This week on Edge of Sports, host Dave Zirin speaks with actor Solomon Hughes about Winning Time, which is debuting its second season on August 6, and about stepping into the role of playing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar himself. Later in this episode, Zirin shares some choice words on the Oakland A’s and Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred; then, in “Ask a Sports Scholar,” we talk with Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas-Austin, about her forthcoming book “Can’t Eat a Medal”: The Lives and Labors of Black Women Athletes in the Age of Jim Crow.

Michael Lee

Twitter: @MiraRose88

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/michael-lee/

Zirin, The Megan Rapinoe Era Only Ends When We Stop Fighting Back

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/megan-rapinoe-retirement/

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Edge of Sports podcast, sponsored by The Nation magazine.
0:04.8	I'm Dave Ziron.
0:06.2	We got a great pod this week.
0:07.9	Let's get to it.
0:14.3	Welcome to Edge of Sports, the TV show only on the Real News Network.
0:19.3	I'm Dave Ziron, and we have an amazing show this week.
0:22.5	My goosebumps have goosebumps. Allow me to explain. One of my favorite TV shows of the last year
0:29.7	was HBO's winning time. It was a dramatic reenactment of the wildly entertaining story
0:36.6	behind the fast-breaking, hard-partying Los Angeles
0:40.3	Lakers teams of the 1980s, the team of Magic Johnson, Pat Riley, and the man in the middle,
0:47.4	Kareem, Abdul-Jabbar. Now the coaches, executives, and players from back then all hated winning time.
0:57.3	They said that the warts and all drama was rife with exaggerations, caricatures, and untruths.
1:03.3	But the public loved it, the critics loved it, and you know what?
1:07.2	I loved it too.
1:08.7	And the breakout star of the show was Solomon Hughes, who had the
1:12.5	extremely difficult task of playing the iconic Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Portraying the very
1:19.1	poker-faced, deeply intelligent Kareem would prove difficult for any actor. But for Solomon
1:25.5	Hughes, who played hoops for four years at Cal Berkeley while earning multiple degrees, it was also his first acting job.
1:33.6	It is a wild story, and we have him here today on the edge of sports.
1:37.9	But that's not all.
1:39.5	I also have some choice words about Oakland, the Oakland days, and the imminent move of this iconic, iconic
1:47.2	baseball team to the great city of Oakland. And I'm talking to a frontline sports scholar,
	...

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